Driving With Dead People (10 page)

JoAnn chose black walls and psychedelic black-and-white swirly curtains. The curtains and her door were always closed. Becky chose light yellow with Mom’s help and guidance. I went against Mom’s advice, ordering pink shag carpet and outrageous wallpaper covered in bright orange and pink flowers. I also wanted my new twin bed built into the wall. The ceilings were so low that building a bed into the wall was a mistake, but we did it anyway. If I woke suddenly—and I often did—I banged my forehead when I sat up.

All three of us girls spent hours in the luxury and privacy of our own rooms. I could finally have friends stay overnight.

Toward the end of that summer, Mom wanted to go on a vacation. I didn’t know why she was pushing it, since Dad had just paid for the new upstairs. Besides, he hated vacations, which is why we didn’t take them. According to Dad, vacations were silly: a waste of time, and too expensive.

JoAnn had left on a European trip with her beloved French teacher, Mrs. Cleary, and her French class to have a wonderfully cultured time. She wouldn’t be joining us.

Jamie would stay home so he wouldn’t miss track practice. Mom told him to watch the house, but I doubted there’d be much watching between the smoking and drinking he had begun enjoying.

On Saturday, Dad, Mom, Becky, and I took off around seven in the morning in our old green station wagon and made it to a Holiday Inn near Gatlinburg, Tennessee, that night. Our vacation would be driving Mom all around the Smoky Mountains.

Mom was passionate about the Smokies. She’d spent years making the annual trek to Tennessee with Martha Whitmore, where they crept along mountain back roads oohing and aahing at the same breathtaking yet oddly monotonous scenery.

Mom was excited and wanted to ride along with her head sticking out the passenger window and her hair blowing—sniffing in the mountain air and admiring the rolling, forested panorama. It was beautiful. But I was eleven and I didn’t care about riding up and down curvy roads searching for waterfalls. I was carsick most of the time, which made the trip excruciating. From their blank looks, it seemed Dad and Becky didn’t care about mountains either, but there we were, zooming along Highway 641 straight through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Mom was mad because Dad was driving like a maniac. When she stuck her head out the passenger window to admire a favorite mountain pass, there was so much wind from the speed of the car, she couldn’t even open her eyes. She looked like Buddy hanging out the window on her way to Dr. Dobbs’s office for her shots.

Mom turned to Dad, her hair sticking up on one side. “I don’t suppose you could slow down.”

“Why?” he asked.

“So I can see the mountains.” Her teeth were clenched. Dad was driving between sixty and seventy miles an hour, while the speed limit was posted at forty. He smiled.

“I can see fine,” he said, not slowing down. Tears rolled down Mom’s cheeks.

I couldn’t remember ever seeing Mom cry or Dad so happy.

Becky and I were in the backseat bored out of our minds and trying not to piss anyone off. If we had to pee or eat, we still wouldn’t say anything. We wished we were invisible. Only we weren’t—we were trapped in the car between the hatred my parents felt for each other, and probably for us. We couldn’t do anything but ride it out.

Problem was, it was hard to ride it out when your ride just turned off the highway and directly into oncoming traffic.

In the next instant a small Honda plowed into my door, throwing all of us to the right and showering us with glass. The impact was so loud, I couldn’t hear anything afterward.

Dad jumped out and ran to the lady in the Honda, not bothering to look back to see if Becky and I were okay. I was right when I decided in fourth grade that Dad wouldn’t love me at my death scene. It was actually worse: He wouldn’t even notice.

Mom leaned over the front seat, grabbing us to check for injuries. Luckily, Becky had been reading
Little House in the Big Woods
by Laura Ingalls Wilder and had had the book in front of her face. The glass hadn’t cut her, but there were tiny bits of it covering her hair. Oddly enough, she sparkled.

At the exact moment of impact, I had leaned forward to tell Mom I’d seen a Holiday Inn sign, so I wasn’t injured by my door, which was now a jagged
V
crunched into the spot where I’d been sitting. I’d missed being killed by inches, but Dad was still busy checking on the other driver.

We looked outside and saw him squatting beside the open door of the smashed Honda, talking to the attractive young redhead sitting dazed in the driver’s seat, the front of her car still fused with my door. She had a large purplish bump on her forehead, but I didn’t see any blood. When we climbed out of the station wagon, we saw that the entire right side of it was demolished and the windows on my side were blown out.

The next morning Dad insisted we drive the car back to Ohio.

We looked at him in disbelief, but when he climbed into the driver’s seat, we climbed in too, wiping broken glass off the seats with Becky’s yellow sweatshirt and laying a beach towel on the glass-strewn floor. Dad wanted to get home to cook steaks for the Rotary Club the next night. Mom’s dream vacation, and I could have predicted this, was a catastrophe.

We clanked and clattered along at considerably less speed. Mom finally saw her beloved mountains, and there wasn’t any glass to obscure her view. The wind blew our hair, and my door was shoved in so far that I was forced to sit right next to Becky, which pissed her off because every once in a while I’d accidentally touch her with my arm or leg. “Don’t touch me,” she’d growl.

We assumed the worst had already happened, and I was relieved in some weird way that the accident had actually occurred. It was a physical manifestation of what had already been going on inside the car. The outside now matched the inside—damaged beyond repair.

We drove without stopping until dusk. Dad picked a different route to get home, one that avoided the highway so we wouldn’t be pulled over for driving an unsafe vehicle. Problem was, he didn’t know where we were. He’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and our crippled car was suddenly headed straight up a steep mountain road.

Becky broke the silence. “Where are we going?”

“A shortcut,” Dad said with a grin.

Our back wheels were spinning, trying to get traction on the gravel, so Dad gunned it and we fishtailed up that road. As we swerved to and fro, I could hear pieces of shattered glass rolling back and forth in the frame of my smashed door.

Becky and I clutched the bottom of our seat. It was getting dark and we were starving, but Dad kept flooring the car up that twisty dirt road. Any dumb-ass could see there wasn’t anything up there, but we didn’t say a word, especially when all it would have taken to shut us up for good was a turn of the steering wheel.

It was getting even darker on that mountain, where there were no streetlights or stores, but I could still make out the crappiest houses I’d ever seen in my life. I’d never seen such poverty—shacks with faded laundry strewn out in all directions, and startled faces coming to peer out of cracked windows that were covered in thick dust from the gravel road, just to see who was crazy enough to be driving up there. These houses scared me as much as Dad’s driving. He was humming Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” even though we were still in Tennessee.

More than halfway up, Dad happily announced, “We’re almost out of gas. We’ll have to coast down.”

This sent me into an inappropriate laughing fit. I wasn’t allowed to get angry, and I couldn’t cry, so I laughed—a lot. Becky wanted to murder me and kept hissing, “Shut up,” but I couldn’t.

Minutes later, when we came to the top of the mountain, Dad killed the motor, threw the car in neutral, and let us roll down the other side.

He refused to hit the brakes as we accelerated around corners so steep that when I looked out my glassless window, I was peering straight down into an abyss. The steeper the road, the faster we went.

I stopped laughing.

Later, the three of us agreed that Dad had probably wanted us dead that night—he’d had the perfect opportunity—and yet, we made it down the mountain. I’d never hated anyone more than I hated Dad, and I swore I would scare him to death someday. I would scare him so badly, he would never recover.

Dad had pulled some horrendous stunts, but when he fucked with Mom’s love of the Great Smoky Mountains, he’d gone too far.

After rattling home in that demolished station wagon without so much as a stroll through Cades Cove to show for it, Mom plotted her escape.

She secretly decided to establish a career for herself and finally divorce the bastard.

When she was twenty, Mom skipped college to marry Dad. She later told us kids, “I would have died if I hadn’t married Glen Peterson,” which made her even more confusing to me. But now her decision to give up college left her with a marriage in shambles and no road out.

Mom’s father had begged her to wait on marriage and think of her education first. But Grandpa Riley, as I’d known him, didn’t hold much sway, since he’d abandoned Granda, Mom, and Dale for his young secretary some twenty-six years earlier.

Mom married Dad.

Grandpa Riley offered to pay for college if she ever wanted to go, and now, at thirty-eight years old, she was taking him up on it.

When Dad found out Mom was going back to school, he screeched, “By God, I’m not paying for it,” thinking that would be the end of it. He knew she didn’t have money of her own.

“My dad’s paying for it,” she said. “It won’t cost you a dime.”

“I doubt that,” he said, trying to think of another roadblock to throw in front of her.

“I don’t care what you think; I’m going.”

“The hell you are,” Dad said. I was creeping down from upstairs in case Mom needed help. It sounded like Dad wasn’t going to get his way, and that’s when he usually started throwing things. I sat on the bottom step.

“Our entire marriage, you’ve done exactly what
you
wanted to do,” Mom told him. “Now it’s
my
turn, and you can’t stop me.”

Right on cue, Dad ripped the closet door off its hinges, and threw it at their cherry wood bedroom set, leaving a permanent scar sliced across the wood.

Mom walked down the hall, snatched her keys off the counter, and said to Dad, “Tear the whole place down. You don’t hold any power over me. Not anymore.”

She walked out, climbed into her car, and squealed out of the driveway. I was still cowering on the step. When Dad resumed hurling things, I snuck back upstairs. I knew nothing would ever be the same after that night, and it never was. My family, which was never much of a family anyway, was starting to fall apart.

Mom signed up for classes at Wright State University in Dayton, fifty miles north of us. After being a stay-at-home mom for sixteen years, she would now be a college freshman working toward her bachelor’s degree as an elementary-education major. (Her real love was American history, but she decided that teaching school would be the easiest way to support herself when she left Dad.)

Uncle Dale came by to drive Mom to her first day of classes. Becky and I walked Mom, nauseous and weepy from fright, out to her car. This was the biggest risk she’d ever taken, and she was terrified of failing.

“I’ll bet they don’t get past Elk Grove,” Becky told me.

“They’ll make it to Dayton, but she’ll never make it to class.” I followed Becky back inside.

Shaky and pale, Mom made it to class. Becky and I cooked her dinner that night: fried chicken and mashed potatoes.

We fell into a routine that fall, Mom driving to Dayton three days a week and either Becky in eighth grade or me, now in sixth, doing our homework with her at the kitchen table.

She wasn’t scared anymore. Letting her hair fall in soft curls around her face instead of pinning it back, and wearing khaki pants, polo shirts, and cardigans, she was enjoying being a freshman.

I rode up to Dayton with Mom when I was on spring break and sat outside her class, reading, until she came out. I was proud of her, especially when I looked in her classroom and saw her taking notes among students almost seventeen years her junior.

Jamie later enrolled at Wright State too, but he wasn’t there very long.

According to the dean’s office, Jamie threw a party in his dorm room, where he decided to spit lighter fluid out of his mouth and then torch it with a match, just like Gene Simmons did onstage with KISS. Unlike Gene Simmons, Jamie caught the curtains and his mattress on fire. He was immediately expelled.

The next morning I was surprised to see him sitting at the breakfast table with no eyelashes or eyebrows, the front of his hair singed into a million tiny curlicues.

No one was speaking. I didn’t ask.

“He’ll find another school,” Mom told me later that night while Jamie was smoking pot in the basement. Unlike Mom, I could smell it coming up through the registers in the floor.

Julie and I loved Jamie. If she spent the night, we stayed awake until we heard his car squeal into our driveway, then we’d run downstairs to greet him. He was always loaded.

One night we knocked on his bedroom door.

“Enter,” he said.

“Jamie, how’s it goin’?” I asked as we sat down on his red carpet in our pajamas.

“Young ladies, what’s up?” He grinned, straining to sit up. His eyes were tiny slits.

“Your lip is busted,” I noticed.

“No kidding?” He shook his head and laughed, lying back down on his pillow. “Man, I think I laid my motorcycle down too. Paul had to bring me home.” (Our cousin Paul partied as much as Jamie did.)

“Holy shit, where’s your bike?” I asked.

“That is a very good question,” he said. “Now you girls go upstairs and let me ponder it.”

“Could you drive us into town tomorrow?” I asked. “If Mom lets you borrow the car?”

“If you quit talking so loud, I’ll drive you anywhere,” he said.

“Okay,” I whispered. “We have to be at Pizza Palace by noon to meet everybody.”

Jamie waved his right hand in the air making the
Okay
sign. “Good night,” I added as we ran upstairs, laughing. I was straight-laced, but Jamie looked like he was having a pretty good time.

He spent a few more months living with us, until he made the monumental mistake of taking a job at Dad’s store. I stopped by one afternoon to hear Dad yelling at him in front of all the customers, “That is the stupidest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.” Jamie was staring at Dad, eyes brimming with tears. He was taller than Dad by at least four inches, and his arms were rippled with taut muscles from all the pole-vaulting. He could’ve kicked Dad’s ass, but I could tell by his expression, he didn’t know that.

“Only an idiot would think of doing something that stupid,” Dad continued. He turned to me and said, “This dummy just rested an extension ladder on my front window.” He pointed to Jamie.

“I was going to lengthen it—,” Jamie started to say.

“Shut up. No one wants to hear your excuses.” Dad picked up the ladder and stormed off to the back of the store. All the customers were staring.

I turned back to Jamie, but he was already outside, slamming the door of his red pickup and tearing out of the parking lot. No doubt he was heading to the liquor store.

A month later Jamie packed all his clothes, some blankets, a pillow, his albums, and his guitar and drove west. He joined a friend in Salt Lake City, where he took a job running telephone cable through the Rocky Mountains. Despite the clean mountain air, his newfound love of rock climbing, and being a safe distance from Dad, his drinking was becoming a huge problem.

One afternoon, when JoAnn was a senior, I smelled wet paint coming from her room, which was directly across from mine. She didn’t like to be disturbed, but I was curious. I knocked softly on her door.

“WHAT?” she yelled.

“Can I come in?” I asked politely. She didn’t say anything, but all of a sudden her door swung open and she gestured for me to enter. I looked around. She was painting “BJK” in red, white, and blue all over her walls. Each letter was a different color.

“What’s BJK?” I asked, easing myself down onto her bed, hoping she’d let me stay a minute.

“Best tennis player in the world,” she said, painting an exclamation point after one of the BJKs.

“Who?” I asked.

“Billie Jean King. She’s paving the way.” JoAnn made a circle in the air with her paintbrush. “And since you’re a girl, you should know who she is. She’s changing the world.” This was the most JoAnn had ever said to me in one sitting. I tried prolonging our conversation.

“What’s she doing?” I asked. JoAnn picked up a
Sports Illustrated
and tossed it onto my lap. On the cover was a brunette woman in aviator glasses and a short white dress tossing a ball into the air, her tennis racket blurred in the shot as she prepared to smack the ball.

I didn’t recognize her, which confirmed my nerd status. JoAnn was way cooler.

“Don’t tell Mom I painted my room,” she said.

“There’s no way I’d tell,” I said, handing back the magazine. JoAnn walked out with the paint can and brushes. Our conversation was over.

The following weekend JoAnn drove to Cincinnati to see Billie Jean King play tennis, and came home talking to Mom so fast I couldn’t understand what she was saying. I just stood there and smiled. I’d never seen JoAnn so animated. As I listened, I decided I was starting to really like her. She was nothing like me; she was nothing like any of us. We might not be friends, but I would watch her and try to be cool.

Tennis rackets, small bright green balls, and tennis skirts were suddenly all over the house. JoAnn took tennis lessons from Oliver Bloom, who followed her around like a puppy.

Unfortunately for Oliver, JoAnn began dating Bill Lawrence, a hopelessly gorgeous boy, six-foot-five and thin as a rail. He had curly blond hair and a Donald Sutherland-type smile. He was the cutest guy I’d ever seen. When they went to the Turnabout Dance together, JoAnn wore a short velvet dress and platform shoes. Bill wore a lime green suit and tie and hovered several feet over her. Julie and I huddled on the couch while Mom took Polaroids of them.

That same winter, Becky was changing. Her body was shapely now and her blond hair and blue eyes looked less like a farm kid and more like a stunning teenager. In the kitchen one night while Mom, Becky, and I were cooking, Mom said to her, “I want you to be careful around your dad.”

Both of us looked up.

“What are you saying?” Becky asked.

Mom didn’t glance up from the lettuce she was tearing. “I don’t like the way he looks at you, that’s all.”

“How’s he look at me?” she asked.

Mom shrugged. “I’m just saying, I don’t trust him. I want to you stay away from him.” Becky was staring at Mom, and I was looking back and forth between the two.

Becky looked at me. “What are you gawking at?”

I turned back to washing the potatoes. My heart raced. Becky was chopping carrots as fast as her knife would go.

Becky was getting prettier, and I was pretty ugly. My front teeth were now in a crooked, unattractive overbite, my hair was greasy five minutes after I washed it, I couldn’t shave my knees without gouging pink oval chunks out of my own flesh, and I’d started my period on a tragic trip to Rocky Fork State Park with the entire family in the station wagon. I didn’t know how to take care of my constantly changing body, and no one was explaining any of it.

As I got uglier, I got funnier. Which was lucky.

I began acting in all the school plays, and was a good singer, which gave me hope. Julie and I spent less time at the mortuary and more time in the school auditorium. Julie was a good singer too.

I joined a drama group called the White Creek Players. Every summer we put on plays in an enormous barn west of Elk Grove.

I was tall, gawky, and a terrible dancer, even though I’d been taking baton-twirling lessons from my friend Susan’s mom in their two-car garage. I wanted to be poised like Susan.

I practiced baton all the time, sitting in front of the television watching
The Brady Bunch
or
F Troop
. I’d twirl the smooth silver baton through every single finger and back again. In the backyard I twirled to songs I’d sing, throwing the baton high into the air and then running in the opposite direction until it landed on the grass nearby. But that wasn’t dancing.

Turned out, my lousy dancing came in handy because it was funny, and funny at White Creek was great. Mrs. Monroe, who’d created the White Creek Players, told me that I was a “character actor” and that they were the most important ones.

“Anyone can be beautiful, but very few people can do comedy,” she told me. “And
you
can do comedy.” She squeezed my shoulder, not realizing she’d just given me an invaluable gift: support for my pea-size self-esteem, and a career goal.

That summer I played a girl named Plain Jane, whom no one ever noticed, but she ended up becoming a huge star, just like I was planning to do. We sang “Applause, Applause,” only with the words “Plain Jane, Plain Jane.”

At the end of the performance there was an awards ceremony. I received the Junior White Creek Players Award for outstanding participant and the Richard Graves Award for talent and commitment. Rich was the music director at White Creek and was loved for his sense of humor and his enormous talent as a musician and actor. It was the best and most important moment of my life.